The landscape of gaming industry seems to be changing rapidly. Firstly, Microsoft reported that shipment for Xbox 360 plunged 61.1% yoy in the quarter ending Jun 07 (Ref). The perception of Xbox 360 reliability has taken a big hit recently as many consumers experienced the infamous “Three Flashing Red Lights” failures related to overheating. To salvage its PR, Microsoft has extended the warranty coverage of Xbox 360 to three years at the cost US$1.06b (Ref). Secondly, Nintendo Wii has taken the market by storm. Its low cost strategy to bring gaming to the mass market has proven to be a great success. Debuted in Dec 2 2006, the Nintendo Wii outsells PS3 by 3:1 in the Japan market and Xbox by 2:1 in the US market (Ref). In contrast to Microsoft and Sony which use the costly in-housed developed cell processors for their game consoles, Nintendo has used relatively cheaper off-the-shelf parts from numerous suppliers. By taking this route, Nintendo is able to introduce the Wii at $250 in U.S. (vs. $599 for the PS3 and $399 for the 360) and still turn a profit on every unit. On top of that, Nintendo Wii also comes with a new motion-sensing controller that can be swung like a bat or a tennis racket.

Since the gaming industry is at the end user market, its changing landscape will trigger a repercussion on the upstream semiconductor industry.

One shaking news this week is 37 years old IBM R&D Vice President, Lisa Su, has joined Freescale as senior vice president and CTO (Ref). I heard from others that she is a very impressive lady, tough but pretty reasonable. I am kind of curious about her background and so I did some googling on her. Here is what I found. Lisa Su obtained her bachelor, master and PhD degrees in Electrical Engineering from MIT. Her doctorate research topic was SOI technology, a new and unproven technology during her PhD candidature. Today, SOI has become the key technology underlying microprocessors and gaming chips. Her PhD work has far reaching significance and she was one of the world’s experts on SOI devices. After graduation, she spent a year at Texas Instruments before joining IBM in 1995. At Big Blue, she was assigned to work on Cu interconnect. To me, she seems to have a great instinct to work on the most critical and challenging projects. Upon completion of the Cu project, she worked one year as technical assistant for Lou Gerstner, IBM’s chairman and CEO, and then as a director of emerging products. Lisa Su was instrumental in establishing the collaboration between IBM, Sony and Toshiba to create the most powerful gaming chips, the Cell Processor, for Playstation. Her last position in IBM was Vice President of technology development and alliances in the IBM Systems and Technology Group (Ref).

Below is a Lisa Su interview video by VLSI Research Inc last year end. This is a great website with many interesting stuff. In the interview, Lisa Su talked about the various technologies and business perspectives in IBM.